Nudity, New Online Laws, and Tryst.link

Age verification laws are being enforced in the UK, France, and Germany

When we make changes on Tryst.link, we aim to improve the site for everyone. Sadly, sometimes changes are forced upon us. We have made changes to how photos are viewed in some countries in order to comply with new ‘online age assurance’ laws that impact sex workers, clients, and the wider public. This change will affect all visitors to Tryst.link (clients and providers alike) with French, German, and United Kingdom IP addresses.

What we’re doing about these laws

Photos containing nudity will soon be hidden, and then replaced with heavily blurred versions, in these regions. We would have preferred to blur photos from the start, but the legislation was inconsistent and is still changing. We decided it was better to be compliant immediately by hiding nudity, then work to blur nude photos later. This minimises the risk for the platform overall and helps us, and you, stay online.

Why we’re first hiding, then blurring nude photos

We don't want to censor nudity, but the alternative is blocking access to, or worse, withdrawing Tryst.link entirely from Germany, the UK and France. We do not want to abandon our users because of these misguided, intrusive, expensive, and impractical age assurance requirements for visitors, so we’ve chosen to limit visibility instead. This keeps your profiles accessible to all visitors from these regions, but unfortunately, without any of your images that contain nudity.

Future changes

In the near future, we will also make modifications to your dashboard and the photo upload page to clearly explain which photos will be censored for regions that require it. This will allow impacted providers to make informed changes to their profiles if they want to. As with blurring, we wanted to include this with our original changes. We know this isn't ideal.

Sometimes, we are forced to make changes quickly and catch up in imperfect stages. In this changing world, we're likely to have to make similar changes in the future without being able to provide you with the most complete version or information from the start. We will always do our best to follow up with additional improvements and clear communication as soon as we can, because we want you to be in the loop as much as possible—especially about legislative changes that impact your business.

Potential impact

I don't know what impact, if any, these changes will have on your potential client inquiries yet. This is uncharted territory for us and the industry as a whole. These laws are changing rapidly, and we expect that they will continue to change as legislators and the public notice the impact on their own lives. Whatever happens, we aim to keep Tryst.link online and available to as many providers and visitors as possible.

The shifting landscape of online legislation

Unfortunately, France, Germany, and the UK are not the only countries exploring internet age assurance laws, just some of the first to enforce them. Many jurisdictions around the world are considering or already implementing “gated access” to adult content. These proposals are rarely written by experts in the field. They often have very poorly defined expectations for platforms, and very broad definitions around the content that could be affected by these rules. In this industry, we're very familiar with the ways these poorly defined rules have led to social media platforms losing far more content and users than they intended to (F’s in the chat for a certain porn-banning blue website).

As more laws are passed, we will do our best to navigate compliance with laws that are inherently anti-sex worker, while operating a platform that has the best interests of sex workers at heart.

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